Middle ground is not so comfortable any more
It’s hard to know how to talk about last Friday. That’s the thing about atrocities – humans don’t often know how to talk about them. Most people, me included, have found ourselves so overwhelmed by this mess of burning emotions that we’re left emotionally constipated. As soon as someone asks what you think, you can’t even begin to see through the thickets of shame and anger and pain. You open your mouth and hear your voice blurting out that most hated of trite Twitter-isms, ‘‘thoughts and prayers’’.
You have to hack through this emotionally inarticulate jungle before you can address the need to do something about this – which is almost always coupled by the crushing sense that nothing can stop this happening again. It’s easy to feel impotent when you’re staring at a tragedy this size.
Obviously we can and should be doing everything right now to show our Muslim communities that we love, support and stand by them. Hugs. Texts. Flowers. Everything that reminds them we’re with them. But when it comes to addressing the underlying issues that heighten the likelihood of these attacks, where do we start?
How do you even fight the alt-Right? Or the internet cesspits that breed it? Or even the Orwellian giant Facebook that is happy to stream mass murder, but won’t let you post a photo of your butt because it violates ‘‘community standards’’.
But there is one obvious place to start: moving away from the ‘‘this was the isolated act of a wacko extremist nutjob’’ argument and the comfortable middle-ground thinking that underpins it.
Comfortable middle-ground thinking is very normal; in fact, it’s probably found among the majority of people. Most social spheres have some foaming Right-wingers who go into ecstasies over the free market’s magic powers, and smug Lefties who like to drop super-woke phrases all the time. And then there’s the majority in between, the comfortable middle-grounders, the apolitical people who don’t really get het up over issues.
It’s not that these people don’t care about anything; they generally believe in being tolerant or not being a dick, but they just tend to think mostly about the things that directly affect their daily lives.
As such, they won’t really dive into topics like Islamophobia, or the rise of the alt-Right, or the risks of an unregulated internet. Or even broader issues like feminism, racism or class inequality. If you’re a well-adjusted, middle-class, affluent white person, hanging out with other nice middle-class people, you’re not going to be coming into contact a lot with angry, disenfranchised isolated communities hanging out on far-Right threads on 8chan. So you don’t really think that they’re a thing.
It goes hand in hand with the assumption that people aren’t like that any more. Most comfortable middle-grounders assume humanity has evolved beyond behaviour like sexism, racism, far-Right nationalism and Islamophobia. It’s naive, but kind of understandable if you don’t run into those ‘‘isms’’ on a daily basis.
You might have seen this thinking before if you’ve ever explained catcalling to your boyfriend. You’ll explain how exhausting it is to get catcalled and your (otherwise lovely) guy will look at you and say, ‘‘Surely that’s not something that happens? Maybe in the 1950s, but that’s not a thing now.’’ And then, ‘‘It must be one isolated creep.’’
We hear the same ‘‘isolated incident’’ argument about Christchurch, whenever someone bills it as the ‘‘tragic attack of a lone nutjob’’. Aside from the stigmatisation it holds for the genuinely mentally ill, the problem is that always assuming this is just a one-off doesn’t acknowledge the ugly forces in society that contribute to such a tragedy.
Yes, this coward is probably isolated and unstable. But he doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum.
He is evidence of a disenfranchised underbelly of angry, isolated men who have been told that liberal forces have stolen their future. And of the festering corners of the internet where the altRights or incels live, inciting and radicalising these people to take revenge on humanity.
And proof that the dark enclaves of the internet can’t be dismissed with ‘‘Oh, it’s only the internet’’, because in 2017 alt-Right groups committed the majority of extremist-related murders in the United States.
So yes, in some ways the comfortable middle thinking is right: most people are good, and not like this. But it’s also naive, because society really hasn’t evolved out of such regressive behaviour.
It is there and only too ready to rise again among the disenfranchised, angry and isolated. Especially when YouTube’s making money off algorithms that push these ideas.
It doesn’t feel that normal people can practically do much to stop future terror attacks. But we can start with dropping our blissful ignorance.
Yes, this coward is probably isolated and unstable. But he doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum.